[http://www.banque-centrale.mg/] <---This will take you the Central Bank of Madagascar for currency rates and other issues.
Todays list of currency 10/09/2014
EUR 3 184.44
USD 2 503.02
GBP 4 053.89
CHF 2 636.56
JPY 23.25
CAD 2 251.63
DKK 428.51
NOK 389.39
SEK 349.74
DJF 14.06
XDR 3 718.86
WALL 79.76
ZAR 227.27
AUD 2 216.30
HKD 322.72
SGD 1 973.21
NZD 1 984.77
INR 41.05
I did a back search on what the Central Bank was offering on Sept 24 when I was at the airport Ivato.
EUR 3 198,01
USD 2 491.05
GBP 4 084.95
CHF 2 647.38
The USA dollar as you see was 2,491 on Sept 24th and I got 2,450 at the Domestic terminal. So I would think very close.
I Posted a little more details Further down the posting two weeks ago titled "Money Rates"
You can enter the date on the Central Bank website when you were here and compare what you actually got at the airport.
Hope this helps
Sending money from your bank to your bank account in Madagascar will get the rate quoted by the Central Bank of that day. Then the money is transferred from the Central Bank to the your bank which may be a small village, so you will get the best rate of that day even if your bank is located in a small village. Were you to change dollars or Euros at banks in smaller villages you would receive much less than changing at a Bank in Tana or the Ivato airport. Tana bank could be for example 2,400ar, in a smaller town it could be 2,100ar, while Central Bank quotes 2,450ar.
So if you plan to revisit Madagascar several times then it might be worth while opening a bank account.
On a similar note, if you are traveling by Air Madagascar more than once to Madagascar then it would be worth joining their Flyer Program called Namako. It is free. And though you may not get enough for free flights you will easily get enough points to carry an additional 10 kilos of bags, in or out of the country saving yourself about $200 dollars, which would be only 30 Namako points and easy to gain on a long haul flight. I recently gain enough Namako points to get a free long Haul flight, roundtrip flight from and to Bangkok.
After reading about how difficult it sometimes is to get cashout in Madagascar I brought a lot of Euros with me.
When I arrived at Ivato I immediately changed some money: I believe the rate was around 3230 Ar for 1€.
After that I changed Euros in Tana and Tamatave with slightly less favorable rates.
Meanwhile I also got cash from the ATM using the Maestro function and those withdrawals gave me even better rates. The last one was 3360 Ar for 1 €.
Note that our bank doesn't charge any costs for withdrawals so that helps too of course.
So my advice is to just use ATM's who support Maestro (all BFV Societé Generale branches) and this way you can save quite a bit of money especially when hotel owners charge in Euros but use a 1 €=3000 Ar rate for convenience (happened in Nosy Be).
ARIARY:
Ariary depreciates continuously since the beginning of May. The dollar traded at MGA 2500 to the end of September, which corresponds to a depreciation of 11% since the beginning of the year, reports the World Bank. This sequence of depreciation of the Ariary which started from the third quarter of 2013 was relatively in abeyance between February and May in response to the net sales of the Central Bank in the foreign exchange market which stated purpose is to smooth price changes, has-been learned.
